Spitfire Guns Firing After 70 Years Buried in Peat

[Vikram]

Thanks to Mack.

[youtube][/youtube]

[brihacharan]

Thanks Mack / Vikram,
> That was simply awesome
> Just goes to show the precision & quality of manufacturing in those times!!!
> The stacato sound of the firing - shell ejection & smooth transition of the cartridge belt was indeed a treat to hear & watch!
> Thanks guys for sharing
Briha

[jatindra Singh Deo]

Wow !! 70 years in the pit ..and yet ...

[timmy]

Very cool! They sure did make stuff right!

I am guessing that being in the peat saved it. Peat bogs usually have very little oxygen, as the decomposition of organic material uses up all that is available.

But they made things well in those days. It might have been nice for the fellow to tip his hat to John M Browning, the designer, however. His designs are noted for being able to endure all manner of environmental challenges and still come out functioning.

Another note: The early Spitfires did have 8 machine guns. In this, they are sometimes compared with the P47 Thunderbolt, which also had 8 machine guns. However, the early Spitfires needed 8, because they were in 303 caliber, and by this time, the metal construction of aircraft made them pretty resistant to rifle caliber bullets.

Later Spitfires carried 20mm cannon, like their enemy, the Me109. They increased the firepower of WW2 fighters, because cannon projectiles can have an explosive charge. In fact, the Japanese found out that only their Zero fighter, with a pair of 20mm cannon in the wings, was effective against the heavily armored American bombers. The rifle caliber guns of their other aircraft were mere mosquito stings in most cases.

The P47 had eight machine guns, but they were 50 caliber (again, a Browning design, and still in front line use today with the US Army and many other forces around the world!) and had a lot more destructive power and range than 30 caliber and 8mm rounds did.

The problem with cannon is that, very often, they had a much lower cyclic firing that did the 30 and 50 caliber Brownings, and in a lightweight aircraft configuration, many cannon had reduced power cartridges. For instance, the famed 37mm cannon in the nose of the P39 was very underpowered, and had a trajectory like a mortar. The Soviets used them well as a tank buster on the Eastern front, but for fast moving air combat, they were useless.

The Germans developed some pretty good cannon that were faster cycling and had good ballistic performance. Unfortunately for them, politics made them stick mainly with the Me109 design, rather than move to the better Fw190 and its descendants. The Me109 had too small of a wingspan to carry enough weaponry for the big American fighters by the end of the war, which by the end often consisted of a pair of 13mm machine guns in the cowl and a 20mm (or, sometimes, a 30mm) cannon firing through the spinner. Here, I must note, you should not take my comments to mean that the Me109 was junk. It was a great fighter, and even with it's mid-30s limitations, the Germans performed wonders with it by the end of the war. But it simply was not sufficient to stand against fighters like the P47 and P51, which were developed later.

By the jet era, even the 50 caliber weapons were not destructive enough for arial combat, as the Americans found out in Korea. The standard fighter armament of 6x50 caliber machine guns for American fighters like the F80 and F86 quickly became 4x20mm cannon in the face of Soviet MiG15s.

After such a digression, getting back to the video, thanks for posting, Vikram! It was a treat to watch!

[xl_target]

Thanks for posting Vikram.
Very enjoyable.

I remember several years ago when the P38 nicknamed "Glacier Girl" was unearthed in Greenland. I remember watching the video of the recovery crew pulling one of the .50 caliber Browning machine guns and firing it with the original ammo that was on the plane. A testament to the design is that the .50 is still used today by US armed Forces. The .30 cal Browning MG was used till not so long ago. Chambered for the 7.62 X 51 cartridge, they were used by NATO forces into the 1990's.

[Mark]

XL, here is one from your neck of the woods (Granite Falls, MN):
[youtube][/youtube]

[Mack The Knife]

Spitfires -

[youtube][/youtube]

[xl_target]

Mark,
Thanks for posting that. I didn't know that there was a warbirds museum in Granite Falls.
It is not far from the Upper Sioux Agency where I was planning to take CK. We ran out of time but if I had known about it, I would have made a special effort to get there.

[YogiBear]

Aloha,

For those of you who are interested in fighters and their guns, here is an interesting site

http://users.skynet.be/Emmanuel.Gustin/ ... un-in.html

As a child, on Armed Forces Day, the military used to have live firing of All of their small arms

individually and Combined for one full minute. Up to and including mortars.

I always enjoyed the 50 cal the most.

The Big Dog Barking.

[Mark]

Yogi that is a pretty interesting and informative link you have there, thanks for posting it!

Mark

[zombie]

Thanks Vikram, it is a really interesting video and speaks about engineering and construction of such a sturdy weapon.

[zombie]

The Germans developed some pretty good cannon that were faster cycling and had good ballistic performance. Unfortunately for them, politics made them stick mainly with the Me109 design, rather than move to the better Fw190 and its descendants.

Don't mean to derail the thread. I just thought to share one more interesting bit of information. There are couple of common things between Fw190 and HAL's HF-24 Marut. Both aircrafts were designed by legendary Kurt Tank. Surprisingly both aircraft couldn't play decisive roles with respective air forces due to political interference. Pilots who flew HF-24 Marut used to call it Hunter Mk. II. It didn't realize the full potential due to under-powered engines.

[timmy]

Aloha,

For those of you who are interested in fighters and their guns, here is an interesting site

http://users.skynet.be/Emmanuel.Gustin/ ... un-in.html

Yogi, an excellent link; thank you very much! I will have some fun studying it.

I liked his analysis:

The disadvantage of an armament of medium-calibre machineguns only was that it lacked the destructive power to be effective against anything but fighters or lightly constructed bombers. Armour that protected reasonably well against .50 projectiles was fitted to fighters, and self-sealing fuel tanks were designed to survive hits in this calibre.

A big part of the success of US 50 BMG armament was that US fighters were chiefly fighting an offensive war of air superiority. Put into the role of a defensive fighter or interceptor, such as what the Germans or Japanese needed, American fighters with 50 caliber armament would not have faired so well. So US designs tended to match up well with the use and the enemy, rather than being an overall best, which probably doesn't even exist (except in the mind of the armchair jockeys!).

This was especially true for Japan, which lacked the engineering depth to produce viable designs to match US aircraft which were already flying in development when the war broke out. The Japanese solution to their inability to develop aircraft engines in the 2000 hp range (which the Americans had in 1940) was to omit self sealing fuel tanks and armor. Zeros could turn into clay pigeons under the sights of 6x50 caliber machine guns.

One thing should be mentioned about the P38. It had the great advantage of having all nose-mounted armament. There was no "convergence point," a range at which wing mounted guns were aimed to. This is similar to the way a SxS shotgun has its barrels regulated.

IIRC, the Navy in the Pacific aimed fighter guns straight ahead, because Japanese planes required fewer hits to take them out. But the AAF in Germany needed a convergence point to destroy tougher German aircraft.

A P38 did not have this problem. All four of its 50 BMGs were pointed to the same point of impact, altho I don't know how they regulated the 20mm was regulated.

This was fortuitous for the USA, since the Hisso cannon (Hispano Suiza, from the fertile brain of Marc Birkigt) used by the USA in WW2 weren't very good weapons, as the author pointed out.

I haven't read the article in depth, but one point that was left out in the introduction in the comparison between gatling type and revolver type weapons (i.e., single barrel vs revolving barrel) is the advantage, in a gatling type, of cooling the barrel at very high rates of fire, which increases barrel life at the expense of additional weight. Maybe he mentions this later on.

Again, an excellent link; thanks!

[andy_65_in]

like all prop driven aircraft of ww ii,the spit nose guns were synchronized to fire through the propeller !however i do believe when firing all guns these aircraft did develop some sort of drag which slowed them [down

[xl_target]

Andy,
The Spit never had nose guns.
They were all wing mounted so no interrupters were required.

You are correct in saying that firing the guns did produce significant recoil, enough to cause a slight drop in the speed of the aircraft.